Riveras ready to make history in boxing ring

Thursday

Mar 29, 2018 at 8:58 AM

It would have been a big enough story on the boxing scene for Jose Antonio Rivera, Worcester’s former three-time world champion, to make a comeback at 45 years old. It’s an even bigger story that he will do so on the same night his son, 24-year-old A.J. Rivera, makes his pro-fighting debut.

The Rivera duo will join the ranks of a few other father-son boxing tandems, but their respective fights, scheduled for August at The Palladium in Worcester, will also mark the first time a father-and-son promotional team has fought on the same card. Jose Antonio and A.J. Rivera run Rivera Promotional Entertainment, through which they have staged five events.

Jose Antonio Rivera, who works as a court officer in Worcester and is the father of four children, will be returning to the ring for the first time since 2011. He has been retired since June 2012.

A.J. Rivera, meanwhile, is making his own dream come true. The younger Rivera was born with spina bifida, a birth defect resulting in an incomplete closing of the backbone and membranes around the spinal cord. He was initially expected not to walk and be confined to a wheelchair. He would also need a shunt to drain excess fluid in his brain and even use a colostomy bag.

“On top of that,” A.J. Rivera said, “[doctors] said if I did live, it wouldn’t be a long life, probably an average of 19 years.”

About a week before his son was born, however, a test confirmed “something good was going to happen,” according to Jose Antonio Rivera. When A.J. Rivera was born, a light patch of skin was found to be covering the hole doctors had expected to find. It had kept fluid from causing nerve damage.

“It was a miracle,” his father said.

Although he said he was monitored through recurring visits to Boston Children’s Hospital, A.J. Rivera did more than overcome the odds. While it took him longer to learn how to walk, he became an athlete and ended up following in his father’s footsteps as a boxer.

And why not? After all, he grew up watching his father enjoy the kind of success most fighters dream of. Jose Antonio Rivera became a three-time world champion, hoisting belts as an IBO welterweight, a WBA welterweight and a WBA light middleweight.

Now, seven years after his final match, A.J. Rivera’s father said he wants to fight at least two more times, which would bring him to 50 professional fights. The time, he said, is right to make a comeback.

“My son and I talked a lot about how he wanted to have a pro fight under his belt,” Jose Antonio Rivera said. “He used to say it would be cool if we could be on the same card. I liked the idea way back when, but then I retired, he went to school and we started the promotion company. He would bring it up now and again.

“I started thinking about it more so at the end of last year. It was like, ‘Maybe we could do something with it.’

The event, which the Riveras are co-promoting with Chuck Shearns’ Granite Chin Promotions and does not yet have a set date, will help raise money for the Milford-based Spina Bifida Association of Greater New England.

For A.J. Rivera, the fight will also be a comeback. He said he stopped fighting in amateurs after his senior year in high school, before going to Johnson & Wales University. He had stopped when he was 10, then returned at 15, when he trained with Carlos Garcia at the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester. When he was 16, he won a fight against an 18-year-old he said weighed 30 more pounds than he. But then he started thinking different.

“Toward the end of my dad’s career,” A.J. Rivera said, “I started noticing ... the fans weren’t really around. Don King sort of abandoned him. I started seeing, ‘Wow, this stuff is not really guaranteed. [His father] had … sacrificed everything, and when it was all said and done, he went back to his full-time job at the courthouse. For me, it was how to stay in the sport I love, but make money. That’s when it clicked.”

During his father’s fight against Daniel Santos at Madison Square Garden, A.J. Rivera said he noticed King and other promoters and managers sitting in the front row.

“A light went off in my head,” he said. “It was like, ‘Bingo. These are the guys that really make the money here.”

The in-ring passion, however, never waned.

“Once you’re a fighter,” A.J. Rivera said, “that fire never really goes away. As I was making these shows and fights happen, the fire was still there and I was like, ‘Damn, you know, I’ve got to do it one more time before I end up being 40 and regretting I didn’t do it.”

A.J. Rivera, who said he plans to fight twice as a pro, is training with Garcia and Rocky Gonzalez at the Boys & Girls Club, his father with another of Worcester’s great fighters, Sean Fitzgerald, and Kendrick Ball Sr. at the latter’s Camp Get Right on Millbrook Street.

The thrill of stepping back into the ring and fighting on the same card with his son aside, the elder Rivera knows there’s also the actual bout itself.

“It’s my first fight in over seven years,” he said, “so we’re not going to go in there with somebody in the top 10. That wouldn’t be very smart. I’ve got to see what I’ve got left in the tank. I’ve got to go in there with somebody’s who’s very respectable and good and able to test me. I don’t think I’m going to be sharp enough to fight someone in the top 10 in my first fight in seven years.”

As they train for their big boxing moment, father and son are understandably excited.

“It’s a chance to achieve something big, and you know I’m taking it serious,” A.J. Rivera said. “At the end of the day, not matter who I fight he has two hands ike I do. He has more of a motive than I do, like, ‘Oh, I can take out the three-time champion’s son.’ I’m treating this the way my dad would treat a championship fight.”

Added Jose Antonio Rivera: “All in all, I think it’s a feel-good story for what we’re trying to accomplish, with my son being the first person born with spina bifida to fight as a professional boxer. For me to be on the same card, on the same night together, and being part of history, Worcester being a part of it at The Palladium, it’s going to be an exciting night of boxing. It’s going to be an exciting night altogether.